Abstract
The author critically engages with the writings of J.P.S. Uberoi, a towering figure in Indian sociology and anthropology whose studies of modern science and European modernity have, nonetheless, been largely ignored within the fields of sociology as well as science and technology studies in the West. Uberoi, as the author shows, provides a unique and important perspective on European modernity by tracing an overlooked genealogy of modern science. Specifically, he critiques positivist modern science and traces its genealogy, as well as that of European modernity, to medieval Christian debates over liturgy. He also presents a nondualist alternative science through Goethe’s theory of colors, despite his strong anticolonial and swarajist (self-rule) commitment. Uberoi’s work, the author argues, represents a postcolonial cosmopolitanism that does not rely on dualist separation between the West and the non-West that forms the basis of Orientalism. Nevertheless, while offering a unique and useful understanding of European modernity, Uberoi’s work remained complexly entangled within European colonialism.
From our non-Western point of view, it is the problem of science and swaraj, i.e. of intellectual enlightenment and cultural identity . . .
The preface of J.P.S. Uberoi’s (1984) well-known book The Other Mind of Europe: Goethe as a Scientist starts with a striking observation: “India as a culture area will be nowhere . . . in the world of knowledge, the sciences and the arts, if it does not first defy the European monopoly of the scientific method, established in modern times” (p. 9). 1 But what does Uberoi’s call to “defy the European monopoly of the scientific method” mean and entail? Such calls, or at least their echoes, have a long history and they have commonly undergirded various epistemological and political efforts at indigenization of knowledges. For example, in India, at present, one can see semblance of such calls in the claims of Hindu science. 2 Uberoi’s book, in stark contrast, is focused on well-known German polymath Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s theory of colors, which he presents as an example of a nondualist alternative science. Nevertheless, Uberoi’s call for defiance of “European monopoly of the scientific method” was not a polemical outburst that should be treated as incidental to his writings and thought. He not only offered a searing critique of positivist modern science, but as the epigraph at the start of this article makes clear, his sociological interventions exemplify an abiding commitment to swaraj or independence of non-Western and erstwhile colonized countries such as India.
In this article I engage with the writings of Uberoi on modern science and European modernity, with two interrelated goals. First, I critically discuss some of the key contributions of Uberoi, a towering figure in Indian sociology and anthropology. Uberoi, as I show, provides a unique and important perspective on European modernity by tracing an overlooked genealogy of modern science. Specifically, he critiques positivist modern science and traces its genealogy, as well as that of European modernity, to medieval Christian debates over liturgy. He also presents a nondualist alternative science through Goethe’s theory of colors while remaining firmly committed to anticolonial and swarajist (self-rule) ideals. 3 Uberoi’s work, I argue, represents a postcolonial cosmopolitanism that does not rely on dualist separation between the West and the non-West that forms the basis of Orientalism (Said 1979). An engagement with Uberoi’s work, thus, contributes to the ongoing concern of postcolonial sociology with “rethinking modernity” (Bhambra 2007; Go 2013b). 4
Second, through an engagement with Uberoi’s work, I address another key concern of postcolonial sociology and science and technology studies (STS), namely, the erasure of the contributions of the non-Western “others” (Bhambra 2010a, 2013; Go 2013b, 2018b; Harding 1998). 5 Even though Uberoi’s sociological interventions on modern science and European modernity are pathbreaking they have been largely ignored within the fields of sociology as well as STS in the West. 6 Such erasures should not be treated simply as empirical oversights. Rather, as Cesaire ([1950] 2000) informed us, European modernity rests on a “colonial forgetting machine” and, to draw on Derrida (1978), we need to explore how erasures provide stability to the “center” and their “supplementing” is a window to the structurality of the colonial structure. Specifically, in this context, such erasures are reflections of coloniality: “the power relationships born in colonialism [but having] outlived the demise of colonial administrations” (Meghji 2021: 19; see also Quijano 2007) that find expression in “disciplinary amnesia” (Steinmetz 2023) and are intimately tied to Orientalist imaginative geography of the Western “self” and its non-Western “others” (Said 1979). 7
In this regard, it is useful to see and show how the work of sociologists and STS scholars can be decolonized and used to study colonialism and coloniality even when those scholars themselves did not do so (Go 2013a). However, we also need to critically interrogate how when anticolonial positions are presented, even by scholars from the erstwhile colonized, non-Western countries, they may remain entangled within the colonial discourse. Indeed, as this article also shows, Uberoi’s work, while offering a unique and critical understanding of European modernity, remained complexly entangled within European colonialism. More broadly, this entails an acknowledgment that postcolonial does not imply a transcendence from the colonial except in the sense of formal ending of European colonialism with the independence of various nations from around the mid-twentieth century. European colonization was not just an external extractive mechanism; through Western education and instilling of belief in “modern science” and “modern values” it has constituted us as subjects all over the world (and that too for many generations): in Ashis Nandy’s (1983) terms, it is the “intimate enemy” that continues to haunt us even in postcolonial times and “informs most interpretations of colonialism” (p. xii). As such, through an engagement with Uberoi’s writings, I would present postcoloniality as a mélange of anticolonial (or decolonial) resistance that is often entangled within colonial discourse in complex ways.
Uberoi, European Modernity, Anticolonialism, and Alternative Science
Uberoi’s (1968) very first publication in sociology of science was titled “Science and Swaraj” and in it he plainly stated, “I believe that the advancement of science in India cannot be separated from the advancement of independence” (p. 119). 8 In this regard, as he argued in a later article that was published in 1985, “formation of conscience in the spirit of self-rule or Swaraj . . . is the third function of the university after teaching and research” (Uberoi and Tyabji 2019:31). 9 Uberoi’s commitment to swaraj stemmed from his concern with the profound negative impact of positivist modern science. On one hand, he criticized modern Western science as “unsuitable or irrelevant for India, China or some other country,” because of “the uses and abuses of technology and applied science” (Uberoi 1978:15). On the other, he highlighted the existential and ontological implications of modern science as “the self-existent storehouse of truth” in relation to which the “rest [non-Western knowledges and practices] is charmingly called ‘ethnoscience’ at best, and false superstition and darkest ignorance at the worst” (Uberoi 1978:14). He candidly admitted, “The relentless logic of this general situation of spiritual travail, which has prevailed steadily over the non-Western world . . . inevitably produces in me for one a shameful inferiority complex” (Uberoi 1978:14).
The swaraj or independence that Uberoi sought was guided by a concern with the unidirectional (from the West to the non-West) and exploitative global division of knowledge-making that hid behind the “pretty phrase” of “world community of science.” He presented this division through a structuralist diagram: “RICH : POOR :: INTERNATIONAL: NATIONAL :: WHITE : BLACK” (Uberoi 1968:123). Within this structure of knowledge production and circulation, the role of non-Western sociologists (and other scholars) was reduced to that of “native informants.” Uberoi warned that
the non-Western world had lost the battle for theory . . . we can now only either do purely empirical work in India in the light of imported theory and method; or else waste time and effort in complaining that borrowed concepts will not fit. (Uberoi 1978:13).
His broader goal was, as the subtitle of an edited volume of his articles suggested, to move “From Indian Studies to General Sociology” (Uberoi and Tyabji 2019). He thus exhorted Indian sociologists to move beyond the “self-imposed limitation to confine oneself to . . . Western theory and method,” which he saw as the case with the natural sciences as well. In fact, according to Uberoi, “non-Western students of nature . . . are more readily persuaded that borrowed concepts do fit.” “For this reason,” he believed that “the ruling scientific theories of nature . . . [were] even more dangerous than the ruling Western theories of man [sic]” (Uberoi 1978:14).
The situation regarding theoretical and scientific contributions from the non-West has definitely changed in recent times. However, we should be careful in dismissing the West/non-West hierarchy in knowledge production and circulation as a concern of the past. Chakrabarty (2000), writing two decades after Uberoi, highlighted how knowledge production is still guided by a “self-consciousness of social science” that assumes only “Europe . . . is theoretically . . . knowable; all other histories are matters of empirical research that fleshes out a theoretical skeleton that is substantially ‘Europe’” (p. 29). As a result,
“They” [European/Western scholars] produce their work in relative ignorance of non-Western histories, and this does not seem to affect the quality of their work. This is a gesture . . . “we” [non-Western scholars] cannot return. We cannot even afford an equality or symmetry of ignorance at this level without taking the risk of appearing “old-fashioned” or “outdated.” (p. 28)
“The dominance of ‘Europe’ as the subject of all histories is [thus] a part of a much more profound theoretical condition under which . . . knowledge is produced in the third world” (p. 29).
Uberoi’s thought and writing were aimed at undercutting and reorienting this Orientalist and Eurocentric hierarchy in knowledge production and circulation. However, his critique was not accompanied with a nativistic espousal of an “Indian” knowledge or science as an alternative. His work reflects a postcolonial cosmopolitanism that transcends his location and identity but is also affected by them. Intellectual self-reliance or swaraj, for Uberoi, did not rely on nationalistic self-enclosure (or indigeneity) because “the life of mind is both a group effort and an individual one” and as such it transcends national and cultural boundaries (Uberoi and Tyabji 2019:63). Swaraj did not imply “relying solely on home-grown and swadeshi [indigenous] ideas or formulating ritual rules of purity and pollution in international intellectual relations.” Its aim was not “determining who first discovered or formulated what idea in which country, but rather . . . making collective decisions on the basis” of “mutuality, reciprocity and equality, and not on the old [colonial] patterns of dominance and dependence among nations” (Uberoi and Tyabji 2019:64). For Uberoi, “the Indian-ness of an Indian science cannot properly consist of the difference of its method or its data, but rather the independence of mind.” Thus, “everything swarajist [self-rule or independence] is good for swadeshi [indigeneity], but everything swadeshi is not equally good for swaraj” (Uberoi and Tyabji 2019:64). In short, Uberoi’s conceptualization of swaraj and anticoloniality sought to undercut the very basis of the Orientalist discourse that relies on accentuation of difference and distance between the West and the non-West (Said 1979), that is, the “law of division” between the West and the non-West (Go 2018a).
Uberoi turned the gaze on Europe/West to excavate the structure of “the European enlightenment or project of modernity” that had spread all across the globe through its proponents in both the West and the non-West. 10 European modernity, and concomitantly positivist modern science, according to Uberoi, “first arose in Europe . . . over the question of the place of God and the sacred in the world-view and the life-world of man [sic]” (Uberoi 1978:26), specifically, over the “question of liturgy, i.e. the mode of presence of divinity in Christian ritual” (Uberoi 1978:25). It is important to note that positivism, which is commonly defined as “any system that confines itself to the data of experience and excludes a priori or metaphysical speculations,” 11 is presented by Uberoi as arising in the context of religious faith (see also Prasad 2024:250). Uberoi was, thus, disturbing an epistemological hierarchy and turning a Western construction of the non-Western “others” on Europe/West. He put that plainly: “In the beginning, as Durkheim the French sociologist wrote, everything is religious, and I only want to say the same of the European modernity, including its science” (Uberoi 2002:39).
According to Uberoi, positivism’s influence in modern social life and thought was preceded by and predicated upon the successful demolition of the “medieval Christian synthesis . . . [of] transcendentalist and immanentist [values] . . . in the sphere of religion” (Uberoi 1978:26). The new regime or structure had two important characteristics: “the dissociation and the autonomy of fact and value in the field of knowledge” and “the dissociation and the autonomy of . . . theory and technique [former’s application] or consciousness and conscience or belief and conduct in the field of life” (p. 26). These divisions, according to Uberoi, occurred in the context of the “theological debate that took place at Marburg in A.D. 1529 over the nature of the Christian ritual sacraments between Luther and Zwingli” and “marked the final inward division between the old and new forms [of knowledge and being] in the history of European civilization” (p. 27):
By stating the issue [“whether the true body and blood of Christ are corporeally in the bread and wine”] and forcing it in terms of dualism, or more properly double monism, Zwingli had discovered or invented the modern concept of time in which every event was either spiritual or mental or corporeal and material but no event was or could be both at once. (p. 28)
At the Marburg conference, Luther had argued “that the sacred rituals of Christianity embodied the real and true point of intersection or ‘consubstantiation’ of divinity or spirit and the profane world and were effective in that capacity” (Uberoi 2002:30). Zwingli, in contrast, argued that the “spirit only spoke to spirit. . .and the sole aim of the divine service was the preaching of the word of God” (p. 33). Consequently, the “world of spiritual truth” was separated from the profane “world of . . . reality” (p. 34). 12 This “debate marked the watershed between the medieval and the modern periods of Europe as representing two distinct world-views and life-worlds” because it resulted in the “mutual alienation of the truth (veritas) and the reality (realitas) or the spirit and the form” (p. 26). 13
This inward division in Europe, according to Uberoi, was accompanied with an
almost simultaneous external manifestation of modern western consciousness as well as conscience . . . by the so-called Age of Discovery when the Christian west cut itself off from the rest of the world in its own eyes and so was able to set out to discover, subordinate and conquer or to destroy the rest without the fear of God. (Uberoi 2002:28)
According to Uberoi, “the modernist philosophy or regime” has been determined “not to face or solve” this “relation between the outward manifestation and the inward manifestation of the new modern age” (p. 28). His excavation of the genealogy of the European modernity and positivist Western science in Europe is aimed at showing this foundational link between the inward and the outward divisions that have guided modern Europe’s consciousness and conscience.
Not surprisingly, his book Science and Culture (Uberoi 1978), ends with a discussion on science and politics in the context of the dropping of atom bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Uberoi wrote, “We are misled into thinking that the monuments of Hiroshima as well as Auschwitz were the result merely of some unfortunate fortuitous links between science, military and politics, which should be viewed as autonomous spheres of responsibility” (Uberoi 1978:82). 14 According to Uberoi, these events, rather than being incidental, were progenies of the European modernity, which, as shown earlier, was marked by an inward and an outward division: “Both were the monuments of the unique civilization that had produced such a lethal mixture of the scientific and the racist impulses of man” (p. 83). 15 However, as a result of the dualist beliefs on which such carnages rested, “the subjective moral responsibility disappeared into the interstices between the physicist (Oppenheimer), the general (Groves) and President of the U.S.A.” (p. 80). Lest we think that such hold of dualist beliefs, within which the moral responsibility of science and scientists disappears, is a thing of the past, the recent film, Oppenheimer (Nolan 2023), is an apt reminder of the continuing power of this discourse, albeit in a mutated and self-critical form. 16
Despite his searing critique of positivist modern science and European modernity, Uberoi neither presented himself as separate and different (the defining element of dualist philosophy and the basis of Orientalist othering of the non-West), nor did he foreclose the possibility of an alternative science (and modernity) for all humankind with genealogical ties to Europe. In Science and Culture, while outlining his intellectual problematic, he wrote, “If what I have to say . . . seem to be a critique of modern science and culture, then I shall take every care to see that it is a critique offered by someone who is both an insider and outsider” (Uberoi 1978:12). 17 And as an alternative to the positivist modern science, Uberoi (1984) presented Goethe’s theory of colors. This alternative science was based on semiological method that viewed the context of study “as a system of signs and relations,” with “an individual sign being treated as both a fact and value, objective and subjective at the same time” (Uberoi 1978:19). An important exponent of the semiological method was “the ancient Sanskrit grammarian” Panini, but so was the poet, philosopher, and scientist Goethe (Uberoi 1978). 18 Uberoi argued that the nondualist method did not die in Europe but went underground and has found expression every now and then. He thus aimed to excavate the genealogy of the “other” Europe: “the radical European underground . . . invisible to the modernist regime except as anarchist, reactionary, heretic or treasonable just like the original Gandhi” (Uberoi 2002:x). 19
Uberoi’s writings in sociology of science are often treated as separate from his other intellectual interventions such as his critique of the concept of boundary among tribes or analysis of the politics of the kula ring ceremony. Such an exercise, I would argue, limits our understanding of not only his broader intellectual goal but also his more specific concerns such as those in sociology of science. Uberoi’s search for alternative science, for example, has to be situated in the context of his broader concern with the relationship between the self and the other. Indeed, rethinking of the relationship between the self and the other in the context of European colonialism and its impact on academic and public imaginaries was central to his life and work. This abiding concern was visible in his master’s thesis that was later published as a book, Politics of The Kula Ring: An Analysis of the Findings of Bronislaw Malinowski (Uberoi 1962), in which he reexamined the work of Bronislaw Malinowski as well as those of other anthropologists on the Kula ring ceremony of the Trobriand Islanders. 20
His reexamination of the work of Malinowski and other anthropologists on the Kula ring ceremony offered a radically different interpretation than other anthropologists of the time. In particular, his concern was that Malinowski presented a “static conception of . . . [Trobriand Islander’s] political position,” which, he argued citing Malinowski, was “sustained by the proposition that: ‘The main social force governing all tribal life could be described as the inertia of custom, the love of uniformity of behaviour’” (Uberoi 1962:99, italics added). 21 In contrast, for Uberoi, the “message of the kula of Melanesia” was
that, in all human life, society and ceremony, whether it be the aspect of symbol or utility, one exchanges with the other, not only . . . things and signs of the world, messages or values, but also oneself in status, role and self-identity, which are thereby renewed or changed in the process. (Uberoi 2002:112)
As such the “unity in duality of the kula system . . . [served] as a kind of language of mediation, discipline and opportunity to affirm the common humanity of each in indebtedness to all” (Uberoi 2002:112).
Uberoi’s critique of Malinowski is a window to how he consistently challenged and reworked the commonly accepted constructions of the Western self and its others. 22 His critique of modern positivist science and, more broadly, European modernity and Enlightenment, challenged latter’s radically different underpinning. He wrote, “our modern Europeans can only imagine any two entities to be dualistically related either as similar and together, producing homogeneity and equality, or else as separate and different, producing heterogeneity and inequality.” The modernist discourse, thus, ignores that “two entities might be in relation of correspondence, equivalence and competition i.e. separate but similar, or else of complementarity and cooperation, i.e. different and together” (Uberoi 2002:128). Indeed, the colonial and Orientalist discourse is filled with representations of the Western self and its others that fail to recognize possibilities of societies’ or cultures’ being “separate but similar” or “different and together.” Uberoi’s analysis of Goethe’s theory of colors, along with the intention of highlighting the structure and method of a nondualist alternative science, was guided by his abiding concern to excavate how the West dualistically separated itself from the rest. Such “opposition of self and other,” according to Uberoi, “is mediated by the emergence of the other self and the common human language of oneself” (p. 113).
In The Other Mind of Europe: Goethe as a Scientist, Uberoi (1984) sought to resurrect this “other” self of Europe through Goethe as a physicist (and a botanist) and showed how Goethe’s system of knowledge (that combined latter’s work in physics, botany, and poetry) reflected mediations between various modern dualist divides such as humans and nature, observer and observed, object and subject, sign and thing, mental and physical, and self and other. It is important to emphasize that Uberoi’s critique of modernist dualisms was not simply an epistemological concern; it was central to his understanding of an in-alienated living or swaraj. We see this objective very clearly articulated in, for example, his analysis of Marx’s writings:
the condition of labour in a truly unalienated human society represents the human unity of theory and practice or the unity of human perception, cognition and volition, or simply of the human eye, the mind and the hand, which effectually brings together the subject and the object into a single unified cycle of mind and labour in the process of production. (Uberoi and Tyabji 2019:55, italics added)
Uberoi argued that in Goethe’s theory of colors light and dark “conjointly and simultaneously affect the material medium . . . which functions to hold them apart and to bring them together according to the context of situation” (Uberoi 2002:55). Specifically, the “Goethean spectrum from . . . a hairline shadow or black band against a white background viewed through a prism” (as opposed to the Newtonian one that was produced from “white band viewed on a dark background through a prism”) presented a different elementary triad of colors. As such, Goethe’s theory of colors, on one hand, provided a different understanding of the spectrum and, on the other, tied together the object (the observed), the subject (the observer), and the medium and did not separate nature from culture. An important difference between Goethe and Newton, which undergirded their respective theories of colors was how they perceived light and dark and the relationship between the two. This difference was not incidental: it reflected different religious and cultural values regarding light. Goethe’s view that “everything living . . . tends to colour; and everything lifeless to white” stood in contrast to the other metaphysics of light that since “early sixteenth century . . . was identified with the [Lord’s] Word” in Europe (Uberoi 1984:40–41). Consequently, for Newton and his followers, the role of darkness (and shadow) in the (observer’s) perception of colors was forgotten.
Conclusion: Tentacles of Postcolonial Resistance
In critically engaging with the writings of Uberoi, I have combined two goals that are complementary. First, this work puts under the spotlight Uberoi’s contributions to our understanding of the emergence of modern science and European modernity, which are unique and innovative and yet largely ignored in the West. Such an erasure, as I argue, is a colonial and Orientalist artifact. This article thus fills an important gap and presents Uberoi’s work as an exemplification of postcolonial cosmopolitanism. Second, it draws together Uberoi’s writings in sociology of science as well as those that shed light into his conceptualization of the dialectic between the self and the other, particularly in the context of European colonialism. Such an exercise is necessary to properly understand his analysis of the European modernity and his critique of positivist modern science. Moreover, as I show, Uberoi’s intellectual interventions were not simply academic exercises, and he explicitly and consistently expressed this himself. His intellectual interventions reflect his anticolonial and swarajist (self-rule) commitments that remained his abiding principles as a researcher as well as a teacher. I have deliberately combined these two goals because discussing one without the other will result in a partial and distorted understanding of Uberoi’s contributions. More specifically, Uberoi’s writings, as I have shown, combine structural sociology of science with that of religion to present both a fascinating understanding of European modernity as well as an anticolonial approach that does not rely on Orientalist and Eurocentric dualist division of the West from the rest.
Historians of science have commonly emphasized how “Copernicus’ astronomical innovation . . . was the first successful break with a constitutive element of the ancient world view” that led to “a new fabric of thought” and a “mechanical solar system” (Kuhn 1992:264). 23 Uberoi overturned this commonly presented relationship between science and religion and their role in the birth of modern science and with it that of the European modernity. Through an analysis of the debate that occurred in Marburg in 1529 (and thereafter), he argued that the question of Christian liturgy—“i.e. the mode of presence of divinity in Christian ritual”—was central to the emergence of European modernity and positivist modern science. Consequent to this debate, Zwingli’s argument of nonsubstantiation (of the divine rituals) prevailed over the views of consubstantiation (Luther) and transubstantiation (the papal church), thereby marking a radical break and a discursive shift constituted through dualist separations such as that between fact and value and the spirit and the body.
One cannot deny that Uberoi’s writings open a line of inquiry in sociology of science and that of religion that has been rarely followed. 24 Shapin and Schaffer’s (1985) Leviathan and the Air-Pump has been celebrated to have “for the first time in science studies” “translated, transcribed, and forced to pass through” technoscientific theories “all ideas pertaining to God, the King, Matter, Miracles and Morality” (Latour 1993:20). Uberoi had been doing the same since the publication of his Science and Culture in 1978 (Uberoi 1978). In fact, when Thomas Hobbes, as Shapin and Schaffer showed, argued against the duality of “Temporal and spiritual government” and suggested that this “could be remedied by collapsing the hierarchical division between the matter and spirit” (p. 98), he was following on the footsteps of Zwingli and the path the latter had opened at the Marburg conference more than a 100 years before him. 25 Interestingly, Robert Boyle too emphasized a separation between material and spiritual of Chrisitan rituals and beliefs but had a different concern. Boyle, for example, regarded “the resurrection” “as an unintelligible effect of God’s absolute and unfettered wisdom, will and power” whose “demonstration . . . was physically possible” (Wragge-Morley 2018:32). 26 I highlight these details about Hobbes and Boyle to emphasize that Uberoi’s analysis of religious origins of European modernity and modern science not only radically reorients the received view of modernity, it also offers a window for a new line of sociological and STS analysis to see and show how Christian rituals and beliefs provided the central context and were the main drivers of debates over modernity and science. 27
Uberoi’s sociology of science writings parallels the emergence of STS in the 1970s and thereafter. Nevertheless, a conversation between Uberoi and STS has been almost nonexistent: STS has barely engaged with the sociology of science work of Uberoi, and Uberoi does not mention STS, although he was aware of them (I can vouch for that, having been taught by him). It may seem that STS, which right from the outset showed modern science as multiple and context dependent, makes Uberoi’s claims about modern science irrelevant. Quite simply, if there is no singular modern science does it even make sense to talk about the birth, structure, and influence of modern science. Moreover, isn’t showing that there is no singular and universal scientific method (Feyerabend 1975) perhaps the best way to defy the European monopoly over the scientific method?
Uberoi did not challenge the universality of the scientific method or argue for context dependence of scientific knowledge production. His study of Newton’s and Goethe’s theory of colors was aimed, as he explained, at “discover[ing] message of the modernity project” and defining “its conditions of existence” as “a universe of discourse” (Uberoi 2002:xi). Although he situated scientific knowledge—Goethe’s and Newton’s theories of colors, for example—in history, Uberoi did not argue that scientific knowledge is context dependent and contingent. Relatedly, and no less importantly, his search for the origin of modern science and European modernity within Europe ended up constituting a self-enclosed identity of Europe and a totalization of modern science and European modernity. 28 This is ironic considering that Uberoi’s other writings, as I have shown, critiqued the concept of boundary and presented social identity and action through his concept of frontier. Uberoi’s position, I would suggest, is reflective of two related and mutually constitutive effects of coloniality: on one hand, the immense power and reach of European constructions of modern science and modernity as universals (most often co-constitutively) and, on the other, on non-Western anxiety with their knowledges (e.g., Uberoi’s exposition of modern science and European modernity) being classified as ethnoscience or “local knowledge . . . [or] tradition,” an anxiety that is an artifact of the colonial discourse. To put it differently, STS with its focus on showing multiplicity of sciences and context dependence of scientific knowledge could not but have emerged anywhere except in the West: if similar arguments were made in the non-Western context, they would be characterized as either a reflection of lag and lack (for not having imbibed the scientific method) or a reflection of a local, traditional knowledge.
In Uberoi’s work we also see the power of European colonialism in limiting and funneling exchanges of the non-Western world through and in relation to the West. 29 His postcolonial cosmopolitanism, which made his critique of European modernity as well as the proposed nondualist alternative science not remain constrained within India or the non-West, was nevertheless circumscribed (there is almost no engagement with other non-Western scholarship). That is to say, coloniality has imposed, and continues to impose, a West-centered structure of circulation of knowledges and practices. Consequently, histories and sociologies of circulations of science(s) without a deconstruction of the colonial discourse risk not just forgetting the enduring legacies of colonialism, but also significant aspects of how and why circulations of scientific knowledge and artifacts take place in a certain way. 30
However, Uberoi’s commitment to universality and unity of modern science (even though he also presented an alternative) does not make his genealogy of European modernity and critique of positivist modern science redundant or superfluous. This issue, despite the profound contributions of STS, cannot be easily resolved. Responding to the multiplicity and disunity of science and its implications, particularly in light of STS contributions in this regard, Peter Dear (2012) argued that “the reality of what science truly is resides less in essential similarities between its assorted branches than it does in the ideology that binds them” (pp. 38–39). As such, “only the presence of this ideology can identify ‘science’ in its modern sense: not particular practices, or specific ideas, but a self-effacing ideological construct that makes claims going beyond what it can fully deliver” (p. 55). 31 I would like to read (or extend) Uberoi’s exposition of European modernity and modern science in the Foucauldian sense, that is, as genealogical excavation of a discursive formation within and through which the universality of modern science and modernity is articulated, though Uberoi does not overtly present such an interpretation. Moreover, following Judith Butler’s (1990) analysis of gender, one could argue that European modernity and modern science, as Uberoi frames them, are performative, and their identity as such resides in their continued enactments and reenactments in the last several centuries. We can certainly see such a performativity and its biopolitical implications in a wide variety of ways and a range of contexts even now.
Footnotes
1
Jitender Pal Singh Uberoi was born in 1934 and died recently, on January 3, 2024. Several obituaries that have been published after his death discuss Uberoi’s life and his enormous contribution to sociology and anthropology (see, e.g., Goswami 2024; Mehta 2024; Prasad 2025; 
). Additionally, Contributions to Indian Sociology published a special section titled “Pedagogic Practice beyond the Classroom: Insights into Professor JPS Uberoi’s (1934–2024) Teachings” (June 2024) that includes contributions by several scholars on their experiences with and memories of Uberoi and his pedagogic influence.
2
Such calls for indigenization albeit expressed as anticolonial can mimic the modular form of Eurocentrism and European colonialism (Prasad 2018) and enfold biopolitical strategies of control in wide-ranging ways (Subramaniam 2000). An uncritical support for indigenization can also be treacherous and result in even well-respected decolonial scholars getting entrapped in taking side with exclusionary and majoritarian identity claims as, for example, happened with Walter Mignolo’s supportive blurb (which he had to later withdraw) for a Hindu supremacist book (Mukharji 2024). Moreover, modern science, for example genetics, combined with concern for indigeneity can be mobilized to create a racialized identity in the non-West ().
3
Uberoi considered his engagement with “the European underground in science” (of which he considered Goethe a part) “an attempt . . . to suitably extend the lessons of Gandhi’s critique of modernity, which he [Gandhi] outlined in Hind Swaraj (1909),” with the eventual goal of providing “a new vision of science as well as politics” (:11).
4
Go (2013b), while highlighting “sociology’s relative indifference to postcolonial theory,” suggested that there are common grounds between the two namely “reconstructing the historical formation and dilemmas of modernity” that can allow their productive interaction (p. 28). argued that “sociology can redress a previous neglect of those represented as ‘other’ in its construction of modernity,” which would rejuvenate sociology “for this new global age” (p. 296).
5
Bhambra and Go, while highlighting the limitations, have also found STS, in particular the work of Latour (1993), useful to critique the universality of modernity and the associated Eurocentrism and for providing tools to reimagine sociology through relationality and connectedness across the West and the non-West (see, e.g., Bhambra 2007:7–9; Go 2013b). STS has had vibrant debates over postcolonialism ever since Sandra Harding’s call to pay attention to “the hidden but real multiculturalism of global sciences” (Anderson 2002, 2009; Harding 1994:329, 1998). However, an important lesson from these postcolonial interventions in STS is that mapping relationality, hybridity, or connectedness between and across West/non-West or colonizer/colonized can be treacherous if we do not carefully deconstruct the dualist categories and rigorously trace the genealogies of these concepts and the colonial erasures that they inhere ().
6
Renny Thomas (2024) discussed how Emily Martin in “her keynote address at the 1994 meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) . . . spoke about the contributions of anthropologists to the field of STS” (p. 255), and among these she briefly mentioned “J. P. S. Uberoi, who, in his book The Other Mind of Europe (1984), questions whether different conceptions of knowledge might have arisen from a different historical place, such as Paracelsus or Leibniz, rather than Newton and Copernicus” (quoted in :256).
7
, while highlighting what he called the disciplinary amnesia in relation to engagement with colonialism, convincingly showed that this “repression” requires a disturbance of memory and an active effort in constructing an “object” of sociology of knowledge that is acutely attentive to colonialism’s analytical import and practical impact in the history and development of social thought.
8
This article was published in the same year that he shifted to India to take up the position of reader in sociology at the Delhi School of Economics.
9
Uberoi’s nondualist philosophy did not separate between intellectual work and the university and the wider society and in this regard, there was a wider agreement among several of his contemporaries in India. In a coauthored article with Ali Baquer, Ashis Nandy, Mohan Ram, and Norman Reynolds that was published in 1979, they wrote, “The academic distinctions often drawn between investigating a situation (research), helping to understand it (learning) and securing rational change in it (action) are false.” They, thus, argued that “learning would be greatly enhanced if farmers themselves were involved in finding the answers to the questions posed” (quoted in :26).
10
He argued that in India “modernists such as Raja Rammohun Roy” enthusiastically started the campaign for assimilation into the European modernity in 1823: 12 years before the famous Macaulay’s minute on education were presented. He added, “Rammohun Roy’s army of modernists has assumed monstrous proportions through a process of continuing exponential growth, busily transplanting in Asia the sciences and the arts of modern Europe” (Uberoi and Tyabji 2019:28–29). Macaulay’s minute on education in India instituted English education in India in order to create a class that was “Indian in blood and color, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect”: the “mimic men” in V. S. Naipaul’s words (see for a critical analysis of mimicry).
11
12
Uberoi argued that the Reformation debates should not be simply viewed as “the Roman Catholic versus the Protestant” but rather as “difference among varieties of Catholicism and of Protestantism,” and such a view can allow us to better understand the decisive break of European modernity that Zwingli ushered (:30).
13
One could also argue that with the dominance of belief in a universal and context-free modern science from the early twentieth century, reality was often presented as synonymous with truth, wherein modern science became the arbiter of truth and reality in the domain of nature and through that more widely; for example, sociologists have relied on this identity of science to define their own claims to veridicality (see, e.g., ).
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In a fascinating scene in the film in which Oppenheimer meets President Truman after the dropping of the bombs, Truman praises Oppenheimer, saying, “you helped save a lot of American lives.” As Truman continues, “what we did at Hiroshima,” he is interjected by Oppenheimer who states, “and Nagasaki.” During the meeting, Oppenheimer shares with Truman, “I feel I have blood on my hands.” Truman then offers a dramatic riposte: “Do you think anyone in Hiroshima and Nagasaki gives a shit who built the bomb? They care who dropped it. I did. Hiroshima isn’t about you [italics added].” Nolan’s Oppenheimer has not only been financially very successful but also received critical acclaim. And yet in this fascinating exchange between Truman and Oppenheimer, the subjective responsibility of science and scientists is deftly removed (except as the moral angst of Oppenheimer as an individual).
17
In another instance he wrote, “Those of us who are of the British empiricist, inductive and experimental habit of mind might start...” (Uberoi 2002:51). Uberoi was not alone in critiquing and engaging with the West and European modernity and colonialism in this non-Orientalist way at this time. For example, , in his widely acclaimed book The Intimate Enemy, wrote, “there is the non-West’s construction of the West which invites one to be true to the West’s other self and to the non-West which is in alliance [italics added] with the other self” (p. xiii).
18
He refused to “follow the French and other structuralists from Saussure in Geneva onwards” because they “sharply distinguish[ed] the sign from the symptom” (:24). For Uberoi, the binaries that he showed as constitutive of science and society, for example, in Goethean and Newtonian theories of colors, were not simply an arbitrary system of signs (as presented by Saussure, for example), they were also symptoms that linked the microcosm with the macrocosm.
19
20
After earning a BTech in electrical engineering and telecommunications from University College London in 1955, he shifted to anthropology and earned an MS in social anthropology from University of Manchester in 1958. His shift to social anthropology at Manchester, as Uberoi mentioned in his acknowledgments, was through the support of Max Gluckman, and he thanked “I. G. Cunnison, for his exacting official supervision and personal friendship,” and Victor Turner for “many richly stimulating discussions” (:xv). After obtaining his MS, he completed a PhD at the Australian National University in Canberra in 1964.
21
Such a static conception of “tribal” life (in this case the social and political life of the Trobriand Islanders), as has been shown by anthropologists and sociologists, was an artifact of colonial and Orientalist imbrication of the disciplines of sociology and anthropology that often constituted the “primitive tribes” as the nonmodern “other,” who remained unchanging and fossilized in the past (see Fabian 1983; ).
22
For example, he critiqued conceptualizations of tribes and ethnic communities through notions of boundary and boundedness and instead proposed the concept of frontier to understand all societies (Goswami 2024). In his doctoral study he had shown “how the Tajiks [of Afghanistan] made claims to a cosmopolitan Islam” through their beliefs and practices ().
23
Although not emphasized as such, it is worth noting how the emphasis on Copernican revolution as marking the break from ancient worldview and leading to the birth of modern worldview has also been central to building a continuity between Greece and modern Europe and with a Western identity that bypasses the reciprocal exchanges with what became the non-Western world (see also Prasad 2022). For example, wrote, “Copernicus began his cosmological and astronomical researches very nearly where Aristotle and Ptolemy had stopped. In that sense he is the immediate heir of the ancient scientific tradition” (p. 33)
24
There have been some important studies that have highlighted the role of religion in the development of modernity or that of specific facets of modern Europe such as capitalism (see, e.g., Taylor 1992; Weber [1904] 2010). Recently, showed how social theorization and analysis of early social theorists were guided by their theories of religion.
25
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27
Similarly, excavation of connected histories through a debate between the Mughal emperor Akbar and the Portuguese monk Monserrate in the sixteenth century points to an important line of rethinking the history of the West/Europe: that “the Birth of Modernity and the beginnings of a truly universal sensibility,” apart from other factors, seem to have been equally a product of the “‘medieval’ view of the world, which had as much in common with Joachim of Fiore as with Copernicus” (p. 749).
28
Such an outcome is in part a result of coloniality, as I explain, and in part because of Uberoi’s structuralist method. As Derrida (1978) in his critique of Claude Levi Strauss’s structuralism argued, “The center is at the center of totality, and yet, since the center does not belong to the totality (is not a part of the totality), the totality has its center elsewhere.” And this contradiction of a centered structure, which according to Derrida lies at the heart of Western metaphysics, “expresses the force of a desire” which results in “a series of substitutions of center”: a continual supplementing articulated through difference and deference or differance (p. 279; see also Derrida 1981). Uberoi, as Derrida shows with regard to Levi-Strauss’s (1966) distinction between bricoleur and engineer or scientist, fails to consider that the engineer or the scientist, who unlike the bricoleur is assumed to be not bound by his/her/their context, may be a mythological construction of the bricoleur ().
29
in his critique of Eurocentric historicism and presentation of histories that can transcend such historicism argued that “the subject of ‘Indian’ history articulates itself” through a double bind, wherein the mode of representation becomes either mimetic and as such reflection of lack and failure or seeks to portray the “originality” and the “difference” of the “Indian” (p. 40). Uberoi’s work, evidently, does not fit these modes of representation and yet it also displays the bind (handed through the legacy of colonialism) of engaging with the Western theories and context.
30
For example, nuclear magnetic resonance and magnetic resonance imaging scientists in India continue to display their networks and exchanges with Western scientists but do not mention their own contributions on their institutions’ websites (Prasad 2014, 2019). However, location in the non-West or an erstwhile colonized nation may not necessarily hinder possibilities of circulation; they may foster other types of circulations (see, e.g., Abraham 2006; Fan 2007, 2012; ).
31
Dear used the term ideology as an idea (“the idea of science itself is the ideology”) or a theoretical model (“The entire model is theoretical”). The use of the term ideology is tricky because it assumes a distinction between, to use Marxian terms, infrastructure and superstructure, and such a distinction as STS has shown does not hold in scientific practice. One could also see the “idea of science,” to use a Latourian term, as a “factish”: a hybrid of fact and fetish (). However, I believe, seeing science (or rather its construction as universal and unified) as a discursive formation is more useful because this “idea of science” transcends contingencies of particular contexts or events as well as the role of particular actors.